Home is often imagined as a place of arrival, a fixed point where one settles into familiarity. Yet for artists Jay Ticar and Amy Aragon, home is less a destination than an ongoing negotiation-a condition continually shaped by movement, memory, vulnerability, and the restless desire to locate oneself amid changing circumstances.

Nest and Cliff brings together works from distinct moments in the husband-and-wife artists’ respective practices, generating not merely a familial dialogue but a spatial and conceptual one. Place emerges here not as an inert backdrop but as something volatile, expansive, and constantly remade through acts of inhabitation, accumulation, and displacement.

Venue
Ground Floor, Building C, Karrivin Plaza, 2316, Chino Roces Extension, Barangay Magallanes, Makati City, 1231 Metro Manila, Philippines

Artists
Jay Ticar and Amy Aragon

Exhibition Dates
July 18 – August 15, 2026

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Website
https://drawingroomgallery.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/drawingroommanila

Contact
info@drawingroomgallery.com

About the Artist

Filipino-Canadian artist Amy Aragon took her BFA at U.P. and continued postgraduate studies in Seneca at York University in Toronto. As a student, her paintings were awarded in the Land Bank, Union Bank and Shell competitions. Since the late 90s, she has been exhibiting in established venues of art in the Philippines and abroad. She has lived and worked in Tokyo, Bandung, Toronto, Vancouver, Manila and now in Singapore.

Immigration and family greatly developed several aspects of Aragon’s practice. To manage portability in moving, initially collecting objects which reflect her identity shifted to gathering images with multicultural content for memory. A sounding object was the first project she exhibited at Green Papaya. Afterwards, several installations and mixed-media artworks followed for her other shows before leaving Manila. These artistic concerns naturally found progression in the compact nature of painting, which guides what she mostly does today. Family led her to concepts of home. She began working on interior-related imagery and photographs as conceptual materials relating to familial connections and memory. She continued working on the exteriors of the home through outdoor imagery, also from photographs taken with the family.

The immigrant home is a constantly morphing entity informed by changing territories, circumstances and future perspectives. Visually articulating its various formations, including its shifting states, requires abstraction and a gamut of contemporary art strategies. In her works, she either produce actual setups of objects and installations or visualize them in a plan. She continually processes these works by engaging emerging issues and personal interests until these articulations distill into paintings.

Jay Ticar formed his artistic foundation while accomplishing his BFA at the University of the Philippines. He was a student of Roberto Chabet, who curated and recommended his first breaks to exhibit. Ticar is an admirer of avant-garde art which inspired him to pursue progression. This led him to further his studies taking up MFA at Tama Art University on full scholarship in 2003. As a result of artistic exposure, resources and working on dynamic platforms, while living in Tokyo, the scope and manifestations of his projects increased. He began engaging in Identity and sociocultural meanings. Ticar also worked on processes where the conceptual material shifts from one creative platform to another. This is a time when he painted through non-painting media and conversely, expressed various media through painting.

Overseas artistic research has been a key factor in his practice primarily because of the subjects of his concentration which he continued to engage and grow. As an Asian Public Intellectual awardee, his research is on the livelihood perspective of the artist’s identity. The ideas and opportunities generated through his year-long residency in Japan and Indonesia are reflected in his creative concepts on immigration and family. In 2017 he was awarded the Asia Centre Fellowship which afforded him to research sound art in Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia. In practice, he organized and presented previous exhibitions about sound art in Manila. As he currently engages in the resonance of the pandemic he carries the accumulation of his experiences in his projects. If asked about the common denominator that links his varied paintings It will be that he is a painter of art projects.

(Text and images courtesy of The Drawing Room)